More Computer musings...

Growing up in the 1980's and 90's and being interested in tech, his meant that I read voraciously about home computing. True, it is a topic that still interests me now but, compared to that period, the market today seems so... boring. By that, I mean that whilst there was a lack of standardisation, there was a vivacity that is lacking today. True, todays machines and software are infinitely more powerful and capable but at heart, they are pretty much the same. From different formats to weird designs, the computer market did suffer from beige box hell but you could still find some individuality. These days, it's black box hell with some neon strip lighting if you feel the need

As the years passed by, there were a handful of machines that appealed to me, either because of the way they looked and/or the functionality they offered. The following is a list of five machines that at some point, appeared on my wish list. I will add though that at no point have I ever owned these machines. I doubt I will as they are of their time and perhaps should remain there. Operating systems, however, do not follow that rule as my previous posts have noted. Having said that, if one of these machines was available, I'd give it a go just to see how much things have changed.

Amstrad PC 5286

First up, the Amstrad PC 5286. Why, you may ask? Well, I have always had a thing for tidy little desktop machines, designed from the ground up to do a job reasonably well without taking up half the floor or desk space in the room. This was a neat little machine that had enough power to work, 1Mb of Ram and a 40Mb hard drive, and a neat little case design that Amstrad used for several of its later PC ranges. Expandability was extremely limited, this machine was a sold as a straight forward package . I do recall that the monitors were horrible and the later 7xxx series were offered with a 10 inch VGA monitor that must have played hell with your eyes! This was a machine that could have seen me through most of my secondary school years but instead, we picked up a cheaper but much bigger LG Goldstar 286 that lasted a few years.

Apple PowerBook Duo 230

Now this machine covered two areas of personal computing, desktop and laptop, by way of a rather clever and tidy docking system. By day, a mild mannered, decently spec'd portable; by night, a decently spec'd desktop by the way of a companion dock.

Monitor and accessories were extra (naturally)

Remember, this was long before the time of fast and secure remote working so the idea was valid back then. It compared well with buying multiple machines (At launch the Powerbook Duo was $2,160 - a corresponding Powerbook 140 was north of $1,600 and a Color Classic was another $1,400, though you needed to add the dock, monitor, keyboard and mouse for the Duo. The Duo combination was a one fits all solution, rather than a multi-device kludge). The Duo did its job rather well, a 33 Mhz Motorola 68030 processor, 4Mb of RAM and an 80Mb hard drive was not too bad a spec for a portable warrior. The dock added a full range of ports, room for an expansion slot, more video memory and a hard drive bay. Altogether, a practical set up and one that worked well. True, it was expensive (and the prime reason this was never on my reality based shopping list - but that can be said of so much Apple kit throughout the years!), but for early 1990's tech, it was rather good. It was probably the sub-notebook format that worked best for me and I eventually got into that format with the Asus eee-PC, which still works as a handy little Linux device to this day. The Duo, however, was the portable for me at the time. Before that, however...

Amstrad PPC 512

Dialling back a few years, this was the machine on this list I came closest to being able to buy. Not that I did as the Amiga 500 was the computer of choice back then and, looking back, it would not have worked well. The PPC 512 was Amstrad's attempt at a luggable. I say luggable and not laptop as seriously, would you put this on your lap??? And which train/plane seat would you occupy? Admittedly, its size does allow it to sport a full sized keyboard and it can be powered by 10 (ten!!!) C-batteries, but the while thing is totally impractical.
Yet at the same time, it isn't. It was an eye opener back then and thirty years of advances make it ludicrous now, but I still like it. Why? Because it offered a chance of portable computing at a price that wasn't stratospheric. Okay, it was only a slight improvement on the likes of the Osborne 1 from several years prior but this was fully PC compatible, offered an MDA/CGA compatible monochrome screen and you could have two floppy drives. Aftermarket accessories included internal hard drives so there was a decent ecosystem around the machine. The 8Mhz NEC V30 processor did the job and there was a non-too shabby for the time 512Kb of RAM. And it looked cool in that 80's industrial plastic kind of way. Buying one today is relatively easy and cheap on ebay, the only downside being that they all seem to lack system disks. But still, not that tempting for me...

Acorn Risc PC

This one came with a pizza oven and the kitchen sink! Seriously, look at the pic below:

The full monty (including the kitchen sink!)

The Risc PC was the follow up to the Archimedes range and, for its time, offered a bang per buck that was hard to match. Using the (then) new StrongArm processors, the Risc PC was a bit of a powerhouse that had been carefully designed around slice based casing.

The bog-standard casing

You see, each slice had space for a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive bay so slice one could handle your floppy drive and CD-ROM, slice two could take an additional hard drive and a tape back-up drive and so on. Each slice could also fit two podule expansions and were easily stack-able, sometime to the extreme. As you have seen above, at one show, a demo machine was set up with every bell and whistle they could think of, including a pizza oven and working tap and sink. Comedy value aside, the industrial design is superb and extremely forward thinking. 

The back end, showing podule expansion backplanes.

If there was a fault, well two in be specific, they were the lack of shielding that scuppered the design when changes were made to electrical specifications and the speed of the bus connecting the motherboard components. However, for the latter, direct access expansion cards allowed new processor and RAM expansions to run without being slowed down by the motherboard. 

By the time this machine came out, I was at the tail end of my Amiga phase and it wouldn't be too long before I joined the Windows PC brigade. It was priced too highly for what I needed and could afford so a cheaper generic PC was the order of the day instead.

Only a couple of re-sellers stock these today and prices are quite high for what you get. Buying one would be for novelty value only as Risc-OS has moved on since then but the physical design has an almost timeless quality and one that I think would work well today. It's just a shame that no-one else took this up.

Commodore Amiga 1200

Finally, we have the Amiga 1200. The last of the affordable Amiga range to be released before Commodore's demise, this was the machine that could, maybe, have saved the company if they had released it a couple of years earlier. Well, probably not saved, but at least let it have another shot in the mid-90's. As it was, company politics and some downright immoral behaviour by the company's management meant that it would have been a tough challenge no matter what the company had produced. 

Similar in style to the Amiga 500 but with a more compact design, the 1200 had enough oomph to act as a basic but decent internet capable machine, even in the mid-90's. It was expandable and more than a few have been converted to tower configurations where the wealth of third-party add-ons in surprising.

It offered a hefty bump in power from the A500/A500 Plus range and demonstrated that with the tools and finance, Commodore's engineers could do the business. The less said about the management pushed A600 (the successor to the A500 range, the better). 

However, the era of cheaper PC's was beginning and it wouldn't be long before Windows 95 ushered in a (relatively) user friendly experience on hardware that was much more capable (albeit more expensive but better value). The closest I came to getting one of these was when Escom bought out the remnants of Commodore and released an internet-access based pack. Alas, I was torn between this and the Risc-PC so settled on a PC (yeah, I know), and as it turned out, Escom was not long for this world anyway.

So there you have it, a short list of the computers that interested me back in the day. Like I said, I doubt I will ever buy any of these for use in the present day but that doesn't mean to say I haven't been a little bit busy on E-bay either, but more of that in the future.

Flight of the Bat - A Book Review

Hot off the presses (in 1963), Flight of the Bat is the second novel by Donald Gordon. His first, Star-raker, is on my reading pile so I'll come back to that in the future). Set in the early to mid 1960's (probably '63 as it is post Cuban missile crisis), the Soviets land a capsule via ICBM to each of the Western capitals (London, Washington DC, Paris and Bonn) daring them to send a response by a similar method within seven days, otherwise they expect surrender talks  they blatantly have superior technology.

The novel sets out the Soviet superiority in missiles and defence technology in general. The West's missile replies are ineffective or shot down, a Polaris boat is lost in the Arctic and hope seems lost.

Except for the RAF who have managed to husband an aircraft programme (the Bat of the title), to the point where it is ready for service. From its description, it feels like a cross between the Valiant B2 Pathfinder and the TSR 2, though more the former than the latter. With two plucky pilots (one British, the other an American exchange officer) plus a bright young lady in the tech department, Flight of the Bat follows the reaction to the Soviet ultimatum and the sacrifices made for the mission to deliver the reply.

Now before I say anything else, the novel is of its time and it would be wrong to tear into it for that reason alone. Given its age, the novel does have one instance of racism from one main character that is quickly rebuked by another, but that is about it, unlike the Nevil Shute novel "In the Wet", which although one of my favourite aircraft related novels, does lay racist terms quite thickly. There is also smoking galore and whilst some of the technical details ring true, there is a lack of detail that modern day readers might find surprising given that public access to weapons technology information has been quite easy since the late 70's onwards.

Still, I will not be too harsh, it's a briskly written tale and rather enjoyable overall. There is a fault with the characterisation (almost stereotypical but then again, the British are terribly British, even when the character is American). When reading this, I was definitely reminded of the films of the period with their clipped, crisp pronunciation, the stiff upper lip and the stoic fatalism that seems to be an RAF entry requirement. At the same time, there is a techno-thriller vibe that feels very Tom Clancy and the combined spy trawler mission and flight to Moscow feel as if they are from a similar, Clancy-esq vein.

I first read this when I was at secondary school and somehow lost that copy. Replacing it cost a few pounds from Amazon and I am glad I have a copy again. If you have a fondness of Nevil Shute and his aviation novels (as stated before, In the Wet is superb), certainly give this a try.